B.C. festival attack case adjourned to January amid thousands of pages of evidence

VANCOUVER — Hearings for the man accused of murdering 11 people at Vancouver’s Lapu Lapu Day festival have been adjourned until January to give his lawyer time to assess thousands of pages of documents disclosed by the Crown.

Adam Kai-Ji Lo appeared by video in Vancouver provincial court Thursday, wearing a blue sweatshirt and sitting mostly motionless in a chair as he waited for proceedings to begin.

The prosecution and Lo’s lawyer, Mark Swartz, agreed on the week of Jan. 12 for the next hearing date.

Lo faces 11 second-degree murder charges and 31 attempted murder charges for allegedly plowing into a crowd in an SUV in the April vehicle attack at the festival.

Prosecutor Michaela Donnelly said the Crown had given Lo’s lawyer multiple disclosure packages since the last hearing in September, with more anticipated to come.

“So we’re well into the disclosure process,” she told the court.

She said both sides agree the case needed to be adjourned further to deal with additional evidence disclosure, and Judge Reginald Harris said putting the case off for “some time” makes sense to deal with the volume of evidence involved.

Harris said there’s been no “election” to hold a preliminary inquiry in the case, and putting the matter off until January “will allow for any more disclosure to come through.”

He said the time will give the lawyers a chance to “comprehend” a sufficient amount of the evidence to decide whether to request a preliminary inquiry.

He said it will allow them to assess “what the issues might be” in the pretrial proceeding, which can be requested by either the accused or the prosecutor, where a judge decides whether there’s enough evidence to warrant a trial.

Harris last month found Lo fit to stand trial on the charges, while upholding a publication ban on evidence heard at Lo’s mental fitness hearing.

Harris, however, agreed on Thursday to a variation on a publication ban that prohibited identifying victims of the attack under the age of 18.

The prosecutor said family members of five-year-old Katie Le, who was killed in the attack along with her parents Richard Le and Linh Hoang, had asked for her name to be excluded from the ban because it had already been disclosed in the media.

Last week, the City of Vancouver, Vancouver Coastal Health and Lo himself were named as defendants in a proposed class-action lawsuit over the attack, filed by a survivor named John Lind.

The lawsuit alleges that Lo’s mental health issues were known to health professionals and law enforcement leading up to the attack, and that the City of Vancouver and the police department failed to protect festival attendees from a vehicle’s “unlawful entry” at the festival site that “was reasonably foreseeable.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 30, 2025.